Monday, April 26, 2010

Tammy was a one time hairdresser and did her own hair for years. I met her back in 1995 when she performed at the Banquet at the Annual Meeting for the company that I used to work for. She was a tiny, tiny woman, really no bigger than a minute, but she sand for two solid hours, backup up by a huge band. She was a true professional - one of my favorites.

In the middle of the 1920's while American college Sheiks and Shebas were swallowing goldfish, cramming into telephone booths and guzzling hooch in speakeasys, France capitalized on an opportunity that the US (due to the restrictive and ignorant attitudes of race) had missed out on:

MISS JOSEPHINE BAKER!

There are limitless reasons to celebrate La Baker, but since we're here to talk hair, her extremely short, pasted flat to the skull, and shiny as a mirror hairdressing was a revelation for it's time. And it was a sensation (what about Josephine wasn't?). No one had seen anything like it and many thought she had actually shaved herself bald and painted it on!

Exploiting the rage to the fullest, a brilliantine pomade came on the market called Bakerfix. By the thousands, men and women, black and white, snatched it up.

This retail counter top display unit recently came up for auction:

Only a ridiculous lack of expendable funds kept it from residing with me!

Two more notes of interest. Firstly, simultaneous to the birth of The Josephine Baker Experience in Paris was the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels, aka The Art Deco movement. The two will always symbolize one another in my mind.

I would take another fifty years for a "lack of hair sensation" to occur again. Ironically, it was another black American (though born in Jamaica) girl who had to depend on Paris for her initial discovery:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MISS GRACE JONES!

And as newer generations seek to outdo their predecessors, Baker had a leopard:

For Halloween, Jacob Neil did the hair and JCPenney Catalog Returns the Dusty Rose Mother of the Brides Dress. But the goatee, that said class. So did the hairy legs through the hose. But damn it, Jacob would have charged anyone off the street $200 for this. And it was boucin' and behavin' hair!

Towards the end of the night, all bets were off. But the wig looked fabulous!

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